Velocity Europe 2014 Keynote Speakers

John Allspaw, Adaptive Capacity LabsResearch and Former CTO

John Allspaw has worked in software systems engineering and operations for twenty years in many different environments: biotech, government, online media, social networking, and e-commerce. He started out tuning parallel clusters running vehicle crash simulations for the U.S. government, and then moved on to the Internet in 1997. He built the backing infrastructure at Salon.com, InfoWorld.com, Friendster, and Flickr, and Etsy. He served as SVP of Engineering and then Chief Technology Officer at Etsy, and holds an MSc in Human Factors and Systems Safety from Lund University.

Khalid Almutari, WireFilterFull-Stack Engineer

A 21-year-old, back-end and front-end engineer from Saudi Arabia, Khalid’s day job is a Full-Stack engineer at WireFilter working on the customer-facing web tools that they provide for their customers. More than 80% of the internet traffic in the region goes through their machines, efficiently handling billions of requests daily.

At night, Khalid works at Crafted-Apps (his own startup) building products, or working with clients to improve their web apps performance and architecture, and transforming their ideas from concepts to a reality.

He also enjoys building open-source projects that help developers build faster web apps, such as Steady.js, PerfBar, and other projects on Github.

Andrew Betts, FastlyPrincipal Developer Advocate

Andrew is a developer, web standards advocate and founder of FT Labs, an emerging web technologies division of the Financial Times. His area of expertise is emerging web technologies, particularly on mobile and tablet platforms, where his team created the FT web app, now well known globally as one of the best examples of what can be achieved with HTML5.

This talk will make you think about the principles of your development process, to support new, more scalable web development practices. I’ll also be talking about a new public project sponsored by the FT and Fastly to build a community polyfill service to support those better practices. It’s time to upgrade the web.

Laine Campbell, FastlySenior Director, Production Engineering

Laine Campbell is the senior director of production engineering at Fastly. An operations and database reliability veteran with 19 years of production experience under her belt, Laine has established her experience and knowledge while working with such systems and organizations as Travelocity, Obama for America, Activision, Apple, LiveJournal, Chegg, Adobe, Disney Mobile, Zendesk, and Okta. She has a passion for technical leadership and has served as leadership and strategy support for high-performing SRE, operations, and database organizations. Laine is the lead coauthor for Database Reliability Engineering from O’Reilly.

As technology jobs become increasingly hard to fill, the average starting salary of an engineer in the valley is more than the median family income in the US for many demographics. Laine will discuss how to build your organization to become a culture and process that drives diversity in recruiting, hiring and retaining.

Mehdi Daoudi, CatchpointCEO

Mehdi Daoudi is the founder and CEO of Catchpoint, the industry’s fastest-growing web performance monitoring solution. Before Catchpoint, Mehdi spent 10+ years at DoubleClick and Google, where he was responsible for quality of services, buying, building, deploying, and using various internal and external monitoring solutions to keep an eye on the ad-serving infrastructure delivering billions of transactions a day using thousands of servers, routers, and various other systems.

Like a rampaging bull, the internet is a complex beast that’s ready to take down your site at a moment’s notice. Join Mehdi Daoudi, CEO and co-founder of Catchpoint Systems, to learn how you can elude some of the more unpredictable movements and get back on your feet.

Brian Doll, SourceClearVP, Marketing & Community

Brian is the Vice President of Strategy at GitHub, focusing on defining and communicating GitHub’s business, product, and corporate strategy.

Brian has been building and selling things online since the mid-nineties, and has held leadership positions in both business and technical roles in the software, eCommerce, and financial services industries. Always the optimist, Brian believes we’re only just beginning to apply the power of the internet to improve the world.

It’s been seven years since the first commit, and today there are over seven million people building better software, faster, on GitHub. For over six years, the incredible community that has formed around the Velocity conference has presented and advocated for all things fast and stable, and everyone is listening. Let’s take a look ahead at what in store next.

Klaus Enzenhofer, DynatraceTechnology Strategist

Klaus Enzenhofer has over five years of experience and expertise in the fields of web performance optimisation and user experience management. He works as director of the Centre of Excellence team at Dynatrace. In this role, he influences the development of the Application Performance Management solution, focusing on real user monitoring of web and mobile applications. He is a regular speaker at technology conferences on real user monitoring and performance-related topics, and has also written many articles and blogs that that been published in print and online publications.

The APDEX was established to give us a metric to optimize our websites for performance but is it still valid? In this session we will explore what is needed in the mobile world of today to identify bad user experience and look into the new concept of a User Experience Index.

Pamela Fox, Khan AcademyCurriculum Engineer

Pamela Fox loves to learn, teach, create, and every combination of those. During the day, she creates the programming curriculum for Khan Academy, to teach the next generation of programmers. On the side, she teaches web development classes for the GirlDevelopIt San Francisco chapter. Before that, she was a frontend engineer at Coursera, a developer advocate at Google, and a graduate from USC’s Computer Science Department.

As the web gets bigger and more ubiquitous, we will need more programmers and more people understanding programming. How can we do that? I'll share what I've learned from teaching programming to newbies, online at Khan Academy and in-person for women in San Francisco.

Vanessa Hurst, CodeMontageCEO

Vanessa is a data-focused developer and the CEO of CodeMontage, which empowers coders to improve their impact on the world. She believes computing is one of the most efficient and effective ways to improve the human experience. She founded Developers for Good and co-founded WriteSpeakCode and Girl Develop It. Previously, she wrangled data at Paperless Post, Capital IQ, and WealthEngine. Vanessa holds a B.S. in Computer Science with a minor in Systems and Information Engineering from the University of Virginia.

Vanessa’s work in technology education and social change has appeared on the TODAY show, NPR, Al Jazeera America, Entrepreneur, The New York Times, Fast Company, and other media. She serves as a cast member for Code.org, a... Read More.

“In times of drastic change, it is the learners who inherit the future.” Ever-changing technologies and evolving systems require we never stop learning, but how does successful learning happen in increasingly complex organizations?

Nils Kuhn, iteratec GmbHSenior Software Engineer

Nils was born in 1977 in Hamburg city in Germany. From 1999 to 2005 he studied biology in Hamburg and finished with master degree.

From end of study to first years of work he moved from ecology and geoinformatics to software- and database-development. He worked as a software-developer in many different projects with both, web- and desktop-technologies.

Since 2011 he is senior software engineer at iteratec with a focus on web-applications and the monitoring and optimization of web-performance.

Steve Miller-Jones, Limelight NetworksSnr Product Manager

Steve has worked in the streaming and content delivery networking (CDN) industry since 2008 and has a strong software project management and web-application programming background. As Director, Product Management for Limelight Networks, he enables Limelight to understand how its services perform from the outside in, and from the inside out. Using “Real User Measurement” data, alongside synthetic and system-wide monitoring services, he leads development of products that ensure consistent high-quality content delivery worldwide. Prior to joining Limelight, he was COO of Global-MIX, which won the Streaming Media “Best CDN in Europe” award in 2009.

Testing, monitoring and analysis of website and web-application performance requires a range of analysis and reporting tools, if you have to create a comprehensive view of the influencing factors. In this session we look at how Limelight securely exposes data about CDN service and object delivery behavior, using HTTP headers.

Courtney Nash, O'ReillyEditor

Courtney Nash chairs multiple conferences for O’Reilly Media and is the strategic content director focused on areas of modern web operations, high-performance applications, and security. An erstwhile academic neuroscientist, she is still fascinated by the brain and how it informs our interactions with and expectations of technology. She’s spent 17 years working in the technology industry in a wide variety of roles, ever since moving to Seattle to work at a burgeoning online bookstore. Outside work, Courtney can be found biking, hiking, skiing, and photographing the Cascade Mountains near her home in Bellingham, Washington.

Monica Pal, Aerospike Inc.CMO

Monica is an engineer and entrepreneur; she started her career in Apple R&D, building messaging, directory and security products and then went on to build marketing infrastructure and agile teams at a series of startups including enCommerce (acquired by Entrust), LignUp, WSO2, AlienVault and now Aerospike, an open source, flash-optimized, in-Memory NoSQL database.

Monica has a BA in Computer Science from Rice University and an MS in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

We live in the Impatience Economy where we want what we want, right here, and right now. How is Big Data re-defining Velocity? A new generation of startups, are building big data driven applications that participate in Real-Time Bidding (RTB) to create personalized experiences in real-time. How are these companies going from 0 to revenue in months, using high Velocity to create big Value?

Will Pressly, EdgeCastPrincipal Software Engineer

Will Pressly is a Principal Engineer at Verizon EdgeCast. Pressly leads the team that authors, maintains and operates all DNS and Load Balancer code for EdgeCast’s CDNs and its DNS Product, Route. He is focused on Application Performance/Extensibility/Reliability and Operational Automation.

Prior to joining EdgeCast in late 2010, Will completed a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Clemson University with a focus on Applied Algorithms and a dissertation concerning diagnosis of Epilepsy from EEG data. When not working, Will endeavors, largely successfully, to prevent his small children from critically injuring themselves.

Mistakes happen. Hopefully not frequently -- but they do. Sometimes they are small, other times big. Sometimes they can be existential crises that can leave deep professional scars.
This talk describes such a mistake -- by the person who made it -- and how the person and the organization recovered and grew from it.

Alois Reitbauer, DynatraceChief Evangelist

Alois Reitbauer is chief evangelist at Dynatrace. Alois is fanatic about monitoring, DevOps, and application performance and has spent most of his professional career building monitoring tools and speeding up applications. He is a regular conference speaker, blogger, book author, and sushi maniac.

Let’s face it. Alerting is broken. We are all still alerting the same way is we did in the early days of software based on metrics violations. We have all started to accept that we get too many alerts and the hard work of making sense is still left to us. This talk will introduce you to the concept of contextual alerting and show the difference hands on using a real world example.

Aaron Rudger, Keynote LLCDirector Product Marketing

Aaron Rudger is a veteran in the Web Performance space with over 15 years of industry experience. As Director of Product Marketing, Aaron leads the product vision, strategy and evangelization for Keynote’s industry leading web and mobile performance and quality solutions.

Prior to Keynote, Aaron held key marketing positions at Right90, BMC Software, Remedy Corporation and iPrint.com. His cross industry expertise in CRM, IT Management and eCommerce can be found in industry publications and technology blogs such as NBC News and Website Magazine. Aaron is also a frequent speaker at industry events like Velocity Conference.

The journey to optimize customers’ experience across multiple channels breaks down the traditional business and IT approaches. Investments in faster Web pages and responsive apps, for example, position companies to capitalize on their digital initiatives, but many have not defined the performance metrics to measure success. How do you analyze and maximize the return of your digital initiatives?

Steven Shorrock, EUROCONTROLEuropean Safety Culture Programme Leader

Steven Shorrock is a chartered ergonomist, human factors specialist, and a chartered psychologist. Steven’s background is in internal and external consultancy in human factors and safety management in several industries and the government; he is also a researcher and educator in academia. Steven is currently a safety and human factors specialist and European safety culture program leader at EUROCONTROL, where he works in countries throughout Europe, and an adjunct senior lecturer at the University of New South Wales School of Aviation in Sydney, Australia.

When things go wrong in organizations, one thing is almost always found in the post-mortem: ‘human error’. But things are not so straightforward. ‘Human error’ fails to capture the context and complexity of work and systems. There is a better way. Let’s journey through the steps of recovery, from explaining away events to understanding how your system really works.

Steve Souders, SpeedCurveChief Curver

Steve Souders is chief curver at SpeedCurve, where he works on the interplay between performance and design. Steve previously served as Google’s head performance engineer, Yahoo’s chief performance officer, and Fastly’s chief performance officer. Steve pioneered much of the work in the world of web performance. He is the author of High Performance Web Sites and Even Faster Web Sites as well as the creator of many performance tools and services including YSlow, HTTP Archive, Episodes, ControlJS, and Browserscope. Steve taught CS193H: High Performance Web Sites at Stanford and serves as cochair of Velocity, the web performance and operations conference from O’Reilly.

Everybody needs to care about performance but often only the engineers do. An exploration of how design processes and wrapping a layer of visual storytelling around the data can engage the whole organization and motivate change.